White-ish Smiles

PHACE

Mathilde Hoursiangou, electric organ
Ivana Pristasova Zaugg, violin
Petra Ackermann, viola
Roland Schueler, cello
Jorge Sánchez-Chiong, electronics

SOUND DESIGN
Alfred Reiter

Dreams, of music, about music, and through music. Three works look at unheard-of utopias, unimagined connections, and parallel realities, each in its own way inviting us to shift our perspective. In Animal Smileys (20222/24), Jorge Sánchez-Chiong imagines a third Summer of Love, playing with an iconography of peace and liberation that seems refreshingly utopian yet strangely out of place in the here and now. Samples and electronic effects transport the soundscape to a parallel universe, a timeline in which the combined hippie and techno aesthetics have prevailed, and an eternal, post-human summer of love reigns.

Effects and distortions also offer glimpses into parallel dimensions in Kadosh (2021) by Sarah Nemtsov. This virtuoso solo piece for violin explores timbres and resonances, takes unexpected shortcuts, and finds new connections between the tones and sounds that wind through the musical material like wormholes, making things seemingly distant appear like neighbors.

Peter Ablinger needs only water and glass tubes to shift reality to another level. Constant drops, seemingly uniform, almost imperceptibly subject to deceleration, interplay to create mutating rhythms and melodies. It is a flowing, almost meditative soundscape, which nevertheless resonates with a certain amount of glassy hardness, which invites you to immerse yourself in WEISS / WEISSLICH 31e, Membrane, Regen (2002) and leaves behind an absolutely memorable listening experience.